


Wendy and the Lost Boy

by pprfaith



Series: Yellow Car [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Again, Alternate Universe, F/M, First of a series, If you really count sixteen as underage, Includes Canon Points, Neverland references abound, Pre-Canon, Underage Character, Underage Sex, author still sucks at titles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 15:36:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/724906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A yellow bug and a hot hobo with a hook. Emma Swan's life is about to get weird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wendy and the Lost Boy

**Author's Note:**

> So, this happened. And it's still happening, really, because I'm having fun. I hope someone else is, too.

+

Wait. Wait. Wait.

Wait.

_Go._

Confident strides, cursory glance out of the corner of her eye.

Shimmy.

Twist.

Pop.

Slide in.

Jam in the screwdriver.

Hit it hard.

Turn it.

_Did it._.

Emma Swan allows herself a tiny noise of glee at successfully stealing the yellow rustbucket she’s had her eye on for the past two hours. It’s not much to look at, but that’s the point. No-one expects you to steal a car like this. No-one suspects a car like this to be stolen.

A sixteen-year-old in second-hand clothes driving a new Beemer, on the other hand… she’d be caught before she made it out of the alley. 

She eases a foot on the gas, let’s up on the clutch, aaaaaand she’s homefree.

“You know, lass, you could have just asked me for the keys.”

It’s not very dignified, but she screams. 

There is someone in the car with her, and she screams, jerks the wheel around and almost sets her price against a wall.

“Jesus fuck!” she curses, barely remembering to use the mirror to look behind her and not just turn around before she gets herself _killed_ or worse, _arrested_. 

Again.

There’s a guy in the backseat, blanket wrapped around his shoulders, stubble, messy hair, bright eyes, laughing mouth. Keys dangling from his forefinger.

Jesus. Fuck.

“Were you sleeping in here?” she asks, which is not the question she should be asking, but her brain is kind of stalling and she steps on the gas automatically like she can get away from him that way.

“Asks the car thief,” he answers, still laughing, and he has an accent, she notices, why is she noticing this, this is not the time for that kind of thing, she hates her teenage hormones. 

She tries to come up with a snappy answer and fails, takes a turn sharply and without signaling. She watched the damn car for two hours. How the hell did she not notice the hot hobo in the backseat?

“What’s your name then, lass?”

She gives him an incredulous look through the mirror. “I’m not telling you my name!”

He shrugs. “What’s the harm?”

Good question. Since he’s literally watching the robbery in progress, she guesses there’s not much point. And he does seem strangely amused for a man whose car is being stolen.

“Emma Swan,” she admits with a sigh.

“Killian Jones,” he answers, flashing surprisingly white teeth at her. “Call me Hook, Emma.”

“Hook?” she demands because of all the ridiculous nicknames…

“Watch out!”

She jerks back around and floors it automatically, her natural reaction to trouble.

“Red light,” _Hook_ chants in the backseat, “red light, even _I_ know that is a bad thing. Watch the road!”

His name is Hook and now he’s giving advice on how to steal his car. With him still inside it. This, Emma suspects, is how Alice must have felt in Wonderland. All the time. 

Behind them, sirens flare.

“Bloody buggering-,” Hook curses, reaching between seats with the keys and she’s already anticipating him, pulling the screwdriver out of the ignition and flinging it into the back footwell just in time just in time for him to slam the keys home and both of them to smooth out their expressions.

A policeman taps the window. She smiles at him sheepishly, rolls it down.

“License and registration, please, miss,” he asks and before she can even think of how to lie to him, Hook leans around her and _beams_.

“Sorry, sir, this is entirely my fault. I bought the car cheap but I can’t actually drive it, so my girlfriend is teaching me and I was annoying her with my questions, I’m afraid. You know how women get. Easily distracted.”

He pats her thigh patronizingly enough that her elbow actually twitches toward his face before she remembers why that would be a bad idea.

The cop hesitates and then visibly relaxes. She tries not to slump in her seat. “Yeah,” the man agrees, sounding put upon. “I hear you. I’m letting you off with a warning. But find a lot to practice in.”

He taps the roof of the car and walks back to his own.

Emma gives in to the urge to melt into a little puddle of relief and Hook isn’t much better. 

“We could have been in so much trouble,” he mutters as he pulls back enough to clamber into the front seat.

She nods.

“Wait? _We?!_ ”

He beams at her again and, up close, he’s really stupidly handsome and not as old as she thought he was at first sight. Less than ten years older than her, she thinks. 

He’s also using his charms to try and distract her.

“You… you stole this car. I stole a stolen car.” 

She laughs, helplessly. 

With a modest shrug, he nods, admitting it. No wonder he was so relaxed. “Now,” he drawls after a moment, giving her time to restart the car and slowly and carefully get away from the cops. “How about you teach me how to drive this thing? As recompense, so to speak.”

“Recompense for what? Doing the same thing you did?”

He waggles his eyebrows at her happily. “Exactly.”

“Wait, you actually don’t know how to drive?”

“I wanted to learn.”

“You stole a car so you could learn how to _drive_ it?”

“Lass, isn’t that the only reason to steal a car? To drive it?” He looks genuinely baffled, which is the only, _only_ reason Emma takes a left, away from the freeway that would have gotten her out of Portland, and toward the industrial part of town, where she knows a few places to mess around in.

“How did you even get away with the car when you can’t drive it?” she asks after watching him making himself comfortable shotgun.

He’s bunched his blanket into his lap, holding it with his left hand, using his right to tap a tattoo on the window. He doesn’t bother with the seatbelt until she tells him to and then he awkwardly fastens it with his free hand.

He flashes that grin again and shrugs modestly. “Didn’t have to get away. Picked the keys off a man so drunk, he wouldn’t have recognized his own mother. Put him in one of those yellow cabs and sent him to the other end of town. He’s unlikely to remember his own name right now, much less where he left the car. Or the keys.”

Pick pocket, then, not car thief. Maybe a bit of a con man, if his bright, distracting gestures and expressions are anything to go by. 

“Not bad,” she praises, faintly.

“Caused less destruction than your method, in any case.”

He gives the punched ignition a wounded look. Since she only meant to ride and dump, Emma doesn’t feel very bad.

“Don’t cry,” she consoles, not entirely honest, and takes a turn into the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse.

+

“Alright, so, step on the clutch, shift into gear, then slowly on the gas and don’t forget to steer, okay?”

Hook nods without taking his eyes off where he’s watching Emma shift through the gears and back down, counting them off as she goes. 

“That does not sound very hard,” he points out and she shrugs. It isn’t, once you stop thinking and just do. She learned driving off a boyfriend she had for all of two weeks. And the first week was mostly sex. So she’s pretty confident Hook will learn quickly.

Why, exactly, that matters to her, isn’t something she dwells on. He’s charming and he’s a fellow thief. It’s enough for her to relax a little and enjoy the view.

“Wanna try?”

Something in his expression shifts and tenses.

As a precaution, she gets out of the car. He follows slowly, fighting with the seatbelt again and then straightens. Instead of rounding the car, he stays on his side, almost like he’s hiding.

With a grimace, he asks, “Do me a favor, lass?”

Emma raises an eyebrow. No way she’s agreeing to anything blindly. 

“Don’t scream,” he requests and then steps around the car to reveal the hand he’s been hiding from her – yes, she noticed. Except it’s not a hand at all but…

“I guess I know where the name comes from,” she tells him, voice only a little higher than usual because the man has a _hook_ for a left hand. A hook with a wicked curve and a point that looks like it could take out an eye.

That’s not a prosthesis. That’s a weapon.

She understands why he’s afraid of her freaking out. Looking at that thing, there is really only one purpose it could have been made for, and that is to hurt. To tear.

But Emma has been on her own since she was fourteen. She carries a knife and mace in her bag, wears steel-toed boots and always goes for the dick or the eyes in a fight. 

Life’s hard and the only way to get by is to be harder. And hell, for him to have that hook, something – or someone – must have first _taken his hand_ , so she gets the sentiment. 

Also, she can read the apprehension in his face, the honest regret at thinking he’s going to scare her off. So she makes the quip about his name and he relaxes enough to flash her a little smile. 

“Soooo,” she wants to know, “Ever been to Neverland?”

He chokes. There’s no other word for the croaking, gagging sound of surprise he makes, half laugh, half…, what?

“Neverland?” 

She blushes. “Yeah, you know, like in the stories. Peter Pan and Captain Hook and the Lost Boys. I liked those stories when I was a kid.”

There is a long minute of silence, where she wonders if he’s about to ditch her for being a dumb kid – and feeling strangely resentful at the though – before he says, “No, can’t say I’ve ever been to Neverland, darling.”

He’s lying. She can tell that he’s lying, but she can’t figure out what the hell he’d be lying _about_.

So she shakes it off, cocks her hip and says, “Good thing that it’s the left one. I don’t think you could drive stick if it was the right one.”

+

The sun is sinking behind Portland’s choppy skyline by the time Emma _thinks_ he can probably drive without killing himself or others. Traffic laws are a different matter though, except for how, well…

“Speed limit in the city?” she asks, for the, oh…. Tenth time.

He scrunches up his face in a way that should _not_ be sexy and asks, tentatively, “Forty miles per hour?”

She blinks at him, something tickling at the back of her neck, like a feather brushing skin, only cooler. He’s lying. 

He… how did she miss this for the past hour? Maybe she just wasn’t paying attention because who lies when being quizzed about traffic laws, but… he’s lying.

Why?

Because he doesn’t want to give the correct answer.

Why?

Because…. Involuntarily she looks over at the car, parked peacefully next to the pile of broken bricks they’ve settled on to talk. She wonders how long he’s been sleeping in the car he couldn’t move, in that alley, under that ratty blanket. How long he’s hidden his left side reflexively. And now here he is, lying to her.

He’s lonely, she realizes. 

Lonely and stumped by the simplest things. Who can live their entire life not knowing how traffic lights work? _Children_ know what white stripes across the road mean.

It’s like he grew up in the wilds of Africa, or something, except he doesn’t have the tan for it. 

“Come on,” she suggests on impulse, not thinking at all, “I’m starving.”

He gives her a boyish look of delight. “Can I drive?”

With an incredulous look she shakes her head. “No way. Neither of us has a license and you drive like a drunken frat boy. She lifts the keys from his jeans pocket – showing off just a little – and bounces out of his reach when he makes a grab for her. He uses both his… hands and she guesses that should scare her, but he uses his hook so easily, it doesn’t really seem an issue at all. 

It’s also kind of hot. 

Which is totally irrelevant.

She gets in the car and playfully revs the engine, watching him scramble after her. He doesn’t fumble the seatbelt at all this time, using his hook as an aid, and she turns the car around and back into the city she meant to escape only a few hours ago.

Huh.

+

Emma takes them through Burger King and they eat in the parking lot, mocking the hipster kids that pass them. Some of them hear and glare, but Hook laughs it off the same way Emma does. 

They’re both wearing badly cobbled together outfits out of second-hand stores and sitting on the hood of a car that looks like it’s mostly held together by hope and luck.

Emma knows that each and every one of those kids – her age, but so much younger – is making assumptions about them. It bothered her, once, a long time ago. When she started school and the other kids always had more than her. Lunch boxes with cartoons on them that weren’t mostly washed away already. Jeans that weren’t darned at the knee so often that the fabric didn’t fall right anymore. Backpacks without holes in them. Money for lunch instead of greasy sandwiches in reused butcher paper. 

They laughed and pointed at her, called her Orphan Emma like it’s her fault, like she was defective somehow, for not having parents. 

So she grew a ticker skin and learned how to punch, kick and bite and eventually, the insults just bounced off harmlessly. 

“Scum of the realm, we are, lass,” Hook laughs eventually, balling up a wrapper and expertly throwing it into the nearby trash bin. She finishes the last of her fries and wipes her mouth and just like that, the day is over again.

She considers asking him to drop her off at the train station. If she plays her cards right and hides in a lot of bathrooms, she can get out of the city on a train rather than with the car, because it’s his. 

Kind of, anyway.

Instead she stretches, yawns and accidentally smells herself. Eugh.

“I need a shower,” she decides out loud and gives him a speculative look. 

He meets it squarely and asks, “What’s that got to do with me?”

She smirks. “You’ll see.”

+

She picks a motel that looks sleazy even in bright daylight and hangs herself off his arm with most of her weight and laughs loudly. 

“That’s… that’s…. you’re so…. Asshole!” she yells as they step into the manager’s office and she lets go of Hook to slam herself on the counter and grin widely at the man behind it. “I wanna room!” she demands.

He leers down the front of her shirt and says, distractedly, “Need to see some cash, lady.”

“No!” she shouts. “Room!”

Hook’s by her side suddenly, “Come on, love,” he soothes, “Calm down.”

“No!” 

She pushes at him, lists sideways, grabs a stack of flyers on the counter to hold herself up and flings them all over the place. She lunges to catch them and upends her purse all over the poor man’s desk.

“Shit!” she screeches, frantically grabbing all her things and shoving them back into her bag. She rounds the counter and starts digging around behind it, collecting tampons and lipstick and tissues and the clerk just kind of stares at her and she keeps cursing and Hook keeps hollering for her to calm down and she nails the clerk in the nose with her head when she straightens and he cries out, grabs his face. She stumbles, lands in the rack of keys, yells about damages and Hook finally has enough, grabs her and hauls her over and around the counter and marches her out of the place and back into the parking lot with a flung out apology for the poor idiot at the desk.

They pull out of there noisily, brakes screeching and then park two blocks away and double back. 

Emma pulls a key out of her pocket and reads the number on the tag. “Eighteen,” she announces. She finds the correlating room number and is pleased to find it far, far from the main office. 

She unlocks the door and waves Hook inside with a grin that’s starting to hurt her cheeks. “Your lodgings, good sir,” she tells him.

He marches past, mock seriously inspecting the room and then turns to her with a snooty look. “It shall do, I believe,” he declares. 

She beams. “First shower!”

She moves to rush past him into the bathroom, but he catches her around the waist and stops her abruptly. He hooks his… hook around her far wrist and tugs her around and toward himself until they’re face to face. 

“Emma, darling,” he asks, “Why haven’t you sent me on my way yet?”

His eyes are really, really unfairly blue and even though he smells like he hasn’t showered in a while either, she still wants to burrow into him and stay there, because, because…

He’s lonely. Lonely and lost. 

This morning, Emma Swan was leaving Portland to start over somewhere else and make herself anew. Again. Another under-the-table waitressing job, another pay-by-the-week room, another few months before someone actually looked at her decided she was too young to be on her own. Maybe another boyfriend who slept with her twice and then ran off with a week’s worth of tips from her bedside drawer.

That was the plan this morning.

But she’s still here and maybe, just maybe, he isn’t the only one who’s a bit lonely, a bit lost. 

“Well,” she says, too slowly, too late, “I can’t really let you loose on unsuspecting drivers yet. You always forget to signal. More lessons are in order.”

He snorts, clearly not believing a word, and then shakes it off. She expects him to let her go, but he keeps holding on. “I believe some would consider what we just did a lesson, too.”

She grimaces. She hoped he wouldn’t catch on to that. It’s just the thought of him sleeping in that car for god knows how long. She couldn’t let him go back to that.

Except she totally could have. 

Because that’s the kind of world they live in and the kind of person she needs to be. 

“How old are you, lass?” he murmurs.

She wants to tell him eighteen, but she’s somehow sure he’d call the lie. “Sixteen,” she answers instead and screws her eyes shut, waiting for him to call her ‘kid’, or maybe ‘almost a kid’, the way some people do. 

Like she’s ever really been a kid.

“Sixteen,” he echoes instead and he sounds… sad. She feels his thumb under her left eye, nudging her glasses up and away. She blinks into blurriness and up at him. He smiles crookedly. “Eyes of a Lost Boy, you have, lass.”

He looks terribly, terribly sad.

And then, “Close them. Close your eyes. Emma.”

She does.

He kisses her.

+

“Can I ask you something?” she asks the next morning.

They’re both tired because between a late night and having to get out of the motel room before the maid showed up, neither got much sleep. But they both got a shower out of it and she put him in one of her sleep shirts. It’s tight on him, but it’s clean. 

Emma herself put on her favorite poufy skirt with her combat boots and didn’t bother putting on enough make-up to look grown-up. She looks sixteen in this outfit and for once doesn’t feel the need to hide. 

Hook doesn’t seem to care about her age at all.

He hums around a huge bite of pancake, swallows. “You can ask. I might not answer.”

She crosses her legs and points at his good arm. “Who’s Milah?”

He doesn’t do anything as blatant as stiffen, but she can see the shutters go down behind his eyes. “Someone long gone.”

It’s a truth, but a warped, convoluted one with most of its limbs chopped off. He touches the hook to the tattoo briefly, and then slides his fingers along the cool metal limb.

“You lost her,” she observes. “Along with your hand.”

The smile he gives her is anything but happy. “Perceptive, aren’t you, love?” He hums quietly. “But maybe you know all about losing people.”

She shakes her head and hides behind her fork. She doesn’t want to answer, doesn’t want pity. But she owes him this. “No. I’ve never lost anyone.”

He tilts his head to one side, observing.

She’s good at reading people and she’s pretty sure he’s reading her the same way she’s reading him. “Ah,” he finally observes. “Never had anyone to lose, did you?”

“No.” She puts down her fork. “I guess you were right. I really am a Lost Girl.”

He shakes his head wryly. “No girls in Neverland, remember?”

“I can be Wendy. And get kidnapped by Captain Hook.” She winks and then blushes, just a little, at her own daring.

She’s not really used to people still being there in the morning. Being there and _able to look her in the eye._

But he just gives her that impish, boyish grin away and brushes his sleeve down over the tattoo, hides his hook back under the table where he’s kept it since the waitress couldn’t stop staring at it.

She waits for a beat to see if he’ll do anything else, but he just goes back to eating.

Emma picks up her fork again. “I think we should probably work on traffic signs today.”

+


End file.
